Whenever I sail I’ve wanted take a photograph that captures the sense of being moved by the wind and pitched by the waves. None of my pictures have ever come close. If you want to see big waves check out the Coast Guard Motor Lifeboat vs. big wave photo gallery. I found that page from Dark Roasted Blend, who also featured some youtube wave videos.

I’ve had some time to think about sailing in gale force winds last year. In hindsight it probably wasn’t that smart to be out there in the rough stuff, but we had a plan if things went sour. That is as long as “sour” didn’t include turning the boat upside down. I think I’ll restrict sailing to lower wind speeds, at least when operating a built for comfort cruising boat.

I was doing some overdue blog house-keeping today and headed over to the google code page to see what new widgets were available. It saw a link to a chart api. It’s pretty good stuff. You can make all the usual charts like pie, bar,scatter and line charts plus venn diagrams.

Here is an example. This image you see below is being generated on the fly, look at the source for yourself if you don’t believe me. You can even plug it into your browser and start playing with the parameters for yourself if you are skeptical.

The “code” for that little diagram is amazingly simple.

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=400x300&chd=s:Chart Preferences&chdl=People Who Blog|People who Like Charts|People who read my blog&chf=efefef&cht=v&chd=t:1000,250,10,50,7,6,10" />

It might look like goobledy-gook to you, but if you head over to the documentation it’s pretty simple.